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Q: How many people with rifles does it take to down one B2 bomber?A: Every last one of them, and the McGovernment won't be as kind about letting the citizenry pretend to be able to defend itself anymore.

I don't think as many people were opposed to it as made to appear on Big Media infotainment outlets.

Polls showed differing numbers, depending on how the questions were asked (even more deviant than normal) and the big "NO" polls were asking in a more or less roundabout way about a government takeover of healthcare, which Obamacare is most certainly not, so the Democrats went for it.

The people that are screaming about government taking over healthcare are/were already going to vote against Democrats out of ideology, it's why they so readily believe the lie that anything this President or this Congress has done so far is "socialist" or even more hilarious "communist".

Personally, I think Obamacare is a joke, but for pretty much the exact opposite reasons that people were railing against it. It's uber-capitalism (well, uber-modern-capitalism anyway, we all know it's different than Adam Smith's vision) in an area where I believe a more social touch is needed.

Personally, I think the jury remains out on whether intelligence of the kind humans possess represents an evolutionary advantage in the long term.

Not if you take the phrase "long term" and extrapolate what that really means. I think that human intelligence is/will be needed if higher life is to survive on any real "long term". It would help greatly in surviving a truly catastrophic (read: apocalyptic) natural disaster, and is utterly required for the species to survive something on the order of Earth's destruction.

Maybe it's not that beneficial to mid-term survival (or at least not PERSONALLY beneficial, the benefits of intelligence being mostly shared with the community at large) but in an actual long-haul look at survivability, I think it's the ONLY beneficial mutation that will matter.

This is assuming, of course, that sea turtles don't become space turtles before the evolutionary make-or-break event comes to pass.

The argument being made isn't that people should get hacked, so this should be released. The argument being made is that by withholding this information corporate complacency will allow whoever is ALREADY using this exploit to continue to do so (as it has for the past 8 months). Your argument falls down from the point of view that releasing the information will force the company to promptly issue a fix for the vulnerability. In fact, your point of view is only valid if the company cannot or will not patch the exploit. Security through obscurity is a joke, plain and simple, trying to strengthen security via ARTIFICIAL obscurity is just plain desperate. If you really care about your accounts, push for fixes not whitewashes.

So, I say, for the sake of protecting the customer, this should be released.

Well, yeah, sometimes. You'll NEVER engineer perfection, but you can do your best to make the ease-of-use / ease-of-misuse comparison as unbalanced as possible.

There isn't a PERFECT solution to any social problem, but much like requiring keys for cars, there are steps you can take to mitigate the issue, maybe not to nonexistence, but it's better than nothing. Imagine being able to tell the stereotypical PC-ignorant grandmother that she can click on whatever she wants to out there in the web, but to never touch that switch without instructions from you (or your patch-Tuesday checking robomailer). It wouldn't be perfect, there would still be viruses, but I'd be willing to bet that we also wouldn't have botnets competing for "world's biggest supercomputer" status.

Last week you asked Jazz technical lead Erich Gamma questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Here are his answers, along with many external links and places to continue the conversation if you are interested.

I'm a 6 digit UID with an old 5 digit UID floating around somewhere, in the 40ks IIRC, back from when I used to live in Ypsilanti. Some theme on The Reaper (my BBS handle back in the day) or Mister Grimm or something like that... good times, good times.

It's like The Force, you see. All around us, binding our processes behind the scenes in ways it takes an enlightened eye to perceive. There is always Linux prodding along the information swirls and eddies that make up our modern lives, unconcerned with the nature or usage of said information.

Windows is like The Force too, except I've never heard a Windows acolyte preach any path other than the quicker, easier, more seductive one...

Presumably by the tech flipping a hardware rw/ro switch on the drive after proper isolation conditions are met.

Yes it's a pain, but much like dentistry it's a preventative pain that spreads a small controlled annoyance over a planned schedule as opposed to a big problem cropping up all at once unexpectedly (and usually at the worst possible time).

Hey kid, check out how well DRM does it's job and then come back and let us know new job you want to grow up and make money doing some day.

And seriously now, just because YOU hope to make money doing something some day none of us are obligated to change our lives in any way to accommodate you. Come to think of it, with the "okay, you exercised your rights, now face my wrath!" attitude you ARE going into the right profession... Look into record company exec and movie producer too.

Now you're just shilling, and you're doing it with that "edgy" attitude that indicates you watched too much powerpuffgirls as a child.

It's cool, I won't get in the way of your little crusade to take on facts while wielding your mighty ability to use the word fail as a noun. You can make up all the personal anecdotes you'd like about your uber-cheap uber-skillful programming, I'm just going to wander back over into the real world, where the malware problem is almost exclusively a Windows issue.

Have fun with your "more productive" tools, and if you keep sprinkling that mixture of fairydust and powdered unicorn-horn your Windows installations will be secure forever.

I'm very curious as to whether that shop you mentioned fits within Microsoft's "TCO" calculations. I'd be willing to be that the company you're talking about goes far above and beyond what Microsoft says an outfit of that size and function should cost. Yes, it is possible to secure a Windows working environment, but as soon as you do you start to find that the other arguments Microsoft relies upon begin falling down. As soon as you start to build effective security your system starts to get harder to maintain compatibility, it starts to get more expensive to hire/train staff, and it starts being less user friendly.

This is just my personal experience matched up to yours, and it's worth just as much (nearly nothing). You want to know the real truth of the matter? Step the anecdotes back for a second and look at things more generally. HOW much is spent per year by businesses in general (not your pet data point) cleaning up malware? HOW much business is lost before it can be cleaned up properly? These numbers are so obnoxiously larger than the 0 you're subtly suggesting that I find the "IQ of a sponge" comment amusingly ironic.